Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair, and good afternoon to all parliamentary colleagues. I am enjoying this urgency session, as I always do, and I am not quite sure whether—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: It is still the 2nd—it still says “Tuesday” on the wall.

Of course, it is Tuesday. Of course, it is Tuesday, because it is an urgency session. I am not quite sure whether we will carry on into Friday or Saturday, but, if we do, it will be more exciting. Just imagine—a group of parliamentarians engaged in a kind of a fierce debate, but a quality and a fair debate, on the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill on a Saturday for the purpose of protecting the public safety and all other good things associated with this particular bill.

To the surprise of the Minister for Building and Construction, the Hon Maurice Williamson, I did read his second reading speech. I was not in the House when the bill received its second reading, because I was overseas as part of the Prime Minister’s business delegation. Three or four people from the sector—probably three, because one of the emails was sent twice—believed or decided that I should read the Minister’s speech, so they sent the speech notes to me by email, and I did read it. Juggling between functions, events, and meetings, I did read the Minister’s speech, and I enjoyed it. There is merit in his speech, and on that basis I should acknowledge that the issues or problems around the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board and the entire sector are historical. So the issues or problems are not necessarily associated with one particular board or one particular Minister, and I believe that is a fair comment. Fairness, or a lack of fairness, is one of the reasons why this sector or a significant number of tradespeople from the sector have taken the case so far, and why many of the tradespeople in the sector have chosen to oppose the bill.

I should congratulate the Campbell Live team on its television report “The politics of plumbing”, which picked up some interesting points that I had not picked up. The confession from me is that I did not pick up the show and I did not watch it until yesterday afternoon—until a group of people, again from the sector, decided that I should watch the show. This was because my mind was directed to some other issues and some other bills, so I had not followed the developments of this particular bill that closely.

The show addressed some interesting but important issues. First of all, who are the cowboys? One of the purposes of this bill is to ensure that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board is properly funded to carry out its statutory duty in order to protect public safety and health. In order to carry out its statutory duty, including the board’s prosecution function, it must be funded in some way. Nobody would argue against that. Nobody would disagree with that. But who are the cowboys? Yes, there are a number of untrained, unregistered, and unlicensed tradespeople in the sector, but if we look a little bit deeper into this particular issue concerning this particular bill, the matter is not that clear-cut regarding the so-called cowboys.

In no way would I defend cowboys if they are genuine cowboys, but, as presented in the television show, among the tradespeople in the sector a number of good, competent, and skilled tradespeople, like Mr Allan Day, who have chosen to boycott what they call unlawful levies and fees in whatever form—or, to borrow the Ombudsman’s words, it is a new form of tax. They have chosen to boycott it because what the board has been doing was against the law. This bill is intended to validate the board’s unlawful action—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Retrospectively.

—exactly, as the Hon Ruth Dyson says—and to make, retrospectively, what was unlawful lawful. If “retrospective”, “ultra vires”, or “validation” are too much like legal jargon, simply watch the Campbell Live show, “The politics of plumbing”.

Where there is a breach of law by the tradespeople, there is a prosecution from the board and by the board, and the entire sector is being asked to fund the prosecution. But where there is a breach of law by the board, we have now a Minister for Building and Construction trying to ram through this legislation in an urgency session to validate retrospectively what was unlawful and make it lawful. That is exactly why we have been asked to be here today to debate a bill that is being rushed through in an urgency session.

Secondly, the information made available to the Government Administration Committee was shocking. In 2001 the cost to relicense for two trades—I am not quite sure which two trades; they could be gasfitting, drainlaying, or plumbing—was around $50, and $75 for three licences. But today a 5-year licence, configured around the board’s regime, costs $10,000.

💬 Andrew Little: What?

It is $10,000, according to the information made available to the select committee. Many of the tradespeople who are employed or self-employed have no choice—

💬 Andrew Little: No wonder we’re running out of tradespeople.

—exactly, as Mr Little says—but to pass on the cost to consumers. Many cannot afford it, and some have chosen to boycott. Therefore, they become unregistered and unlicensed and therefore they are nicknamed cowboys. The same 5-year licence in Australia costs only $330. It is no wonder that we are losing quality tradespeople to Australia and our housing prices are getting higher and higher. I welcome and urge the Minister to rebut the claim. But what is more scary, and what should cause more concern, is that if we let the sector carry on under the leadership of the Minister and the leadership of the board, sooner or later to get a plumber, gasfitter, or drainlayer to your doorstep will be as expensive as it is to instruct a lawyer.

I feel so sorry for the Minister for Building and Construction, the Hon Maurice Williamson, who is one of the most experienced and longest-serving MPs in New Zealand. But watching him on Campbell Live, where we saw a picture of him framed by a toilet seat too, I felt saddened. I felt saddened when I watched the television show yesterday, and I still feel saddened. Although politics is not designed for the faint-hearted or the thin-skinned, this is not a good look for his National-led Government, supported by ACT and Mr Peter Dunne. This reflects, to a large extent, the level of frustration of the sector. Again, I feel saddened because it is not a good look for the Minister, it is not a good look for the Government, and it is not a good look for all politicians. Again, this reflects to a large extent the level of frustration of the sector, and this is one of the many reasons why Labour finds it hard to support this bill.

In my subsequent contributions I would like to touch upon some details in this bill. Thank you.

Well, Mr Chair, this is your favourite bill, no doubt, and mine, and it is one of the most interesting and unusual bills I have had to deal with in my short time in this House. The Green Party opposes the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill, and we will continue to do so in this Committee stage, for a number of reasons. Probably, actually, chief amongst those is the incredibly poor process that has been followed with regard to this bill.

I thought I would begin my contribution by outlining briefly just what that process has been. The bill was introduced in March, as we know, with an incredibly short select committee consideration period of initially just 1 week. It was later extended to 2 weeks, but it was still an incredibly short period of time. That was due to the apparently urgent need to pass this legislation—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Sorry, when was that?

Before 1 April, apparently. Very urgent—before 1 April, we needed to pass this legislation. I know that the dates on the walls here are slightly behind today, but they still say 2 July, and 1 April was quite a long time ago. Here we are in the House with the bill at only its Committee stage, yet the Government Administration Committee has done quite heroic efforts, I think, to consider this bill in an incredibly short period of time due to its apparent urgency.

Due to that constrained period of time, many submitters were unable to be heard. Many had to have their submissions recorded as correspondence, rather than as submissions, because they were received after the closing date. They had very little notification of the time available in which to make those submissions. Given that we know that what, in part, has given rise to the need for this bill is a large amount of dissatisfaction in the plumbing, gasfitting, and drainlaying sector, the incredibly short time that was applied to the select committee process and the fact that many individual stakeholders who felt that they had a very strong interest in this were not able to make submissions and had very little notice of the bill coming up in the House will have only added to that high level of dissatisfaction in the sector.

As we have said, to add insult to that injury, despite the rush and the select committee reporting back in time, that deadline of 1 April came and went with no change, and the bill has been languishing for months since its second reading. It is now July and we are finally having the Committee stage. Despite the fact that we are sitting under urgency, clearly no urgency has actually been accorded to this bill in terms of the priority given to it by the Government after that initial panic of its introduction and short process. Clearly, it could have had months longer at the select committee, it could have had a proper period of scrutiny, it could have had a proper period of submissions, and we could be back here right now in a much different position.

I want to acknowledge at this point the pressure that such shortened select committee periods place not only on submitters and members of the public but on the select committee staff, on the Parliamentary Counsel Office drafters, and on the officials who advise the committee. It is not actually really the members of the committee who suffer the most—although we often go to considerable efforts to make sure we have read all of the submissions in a short period of time—but the staff and the advisers, who quietly get on with it and bust a gut behind the scenes to meet these urgent deadlines. In this case, it appears that it was all completely unnecessary, because here we are, months later, with absolutely no priority having been given to the bill since then. So those are the procedural reasons for our opposition to this bill.

In terms of the substantive reasons for our opposition, they are very clear. It comes down, really, to the point that retrospective legislation should be extremely rare in this House and that when it occurs, it should be subject to a very high bar. It is not clear at all in this case that that bar has been met.

As we know, this bill retrospectively validates fees and levies that have been collected in what turns out to have been an unlawful manner since 2006 by the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board. This unlawful practice has been the subject of complaints to every available adjudicator. The matter has been to the Regulations Review Committee, it has been to the Ombudsman, it has been to the Auditor-General, and it has been back to the Regulations Review Committee, and in every case those complaints were upheld. They were rightful complaints, they had a right to take them, and the adjudicators in every case upheld those complaints. So there is a real issue of natural justice when, after someone’s complaint has been upheld by every channel available, Parliament simply legislates to make it go away. It said: “Ah, there is a problem there. Congratulations on taking this complaint. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. We are now going to retrospectively validate this unlawful conduct so that your complaint will go away.” That is not acceptable. It is unfair, and it should not be happening in this case.

Even if the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board believed—and I believe the board to be frank and honest when it says it believed it was acting lawfully. But believing one is acting lawfully is not the same as acting lawfully. Much in the same way as we are seeing at the moment with the Government Communications Security Bureau, believing one is acting lawfully does not make it so. It is offensive to the rule of law for Parliament to come in and say, effectively: “Well, we have to make the law catch up with the practice.” It should not be done lightly, and we think it is being done lightly in this case.

We do agree—and this is where we do agree with parts of the bill—that there is a need for legislation to validate the collection of the offences fee by the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board in the future, because we agree that the board should be able to prosecute non-licensed practitioners when complaints about them are received. Indeed, we think it is in the interests of the whole industry to ensure that that can happen—to ensure that the so-called cowboys are regulated. It has negative consequences for all plumbers and gasfitters when those unregistered, unlicensed practitioners bring their industry into disrepute, and it is a logical, natural thing that the board should be able to prosecute those complaints. So we could absolutely support legislation of this nature if it applied only to how the board collects levies and how it prosecutes complaints in the future. But we cannot support its retrospective application.

The reason we have been given as to why it is so important to apply this law retrospectively is that if the board was required to pay back the unlawfully collected levies and fees, it might be left bankrupt. We can agree that it is not a desirable outcome, obviously, for that to happen. But our question is why should the Government not provide the board with some financial support to ensure that this does not happen? After all, it was poorly drafted legislation in 2006 that led to this problem in the first place. It created the situation where the board thought it was acting lawfully, but it turned out that it was not. Surely, there is some responsibility on the part of the Government, of the Crown, to help put that right, including making a financial contribution to ensure that if the board was required to pay back those fees and levies, there would be some financial support from the Government to enable it to do that without falling over financially.

The best estimate we were able to obtain at the select committee was that in order to do that, we might be talking in the vicinity of $1 million. I know that $1 million is a lot of money, but in the scheme of the Government coffers, it is hardly going to break the bank. It seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in this situation, given it was a Government error in the first place, that the Crown should help with some of the financial liability if, indeed, those fees and levies need to be paid back.

Those are the substantive reasons why the Green Party continues to oppose this bill. We have both procedural and substantive reasons for doing so.

The Committee is in quite an interesting position, because it has a select committee report where the select committee said that it was “unable to agree” on whether the bill should pass. That, I think, is indicative of what a mess this whole process around this bill has been.

There was one substantive amendment that the committee could agree on. That was an amendment to clause 5, to insert new subsection 171B(2) to make it clear that although the board could continue to collect the offences fee in future, it could not change the fee, and that in order to change the fee, it would need to replace the fee with an appropriate disciplinary and prosecution levy imposed under section 143. This change, I think, speaks to the need to get the process right for the future collection of fees and levies, and that is why the Green Party can support that one technical amendment to the bill.

But we cannot support the bill as a whole, because of its retrospective nature. We will continue to oppose it in this Committee stage and in the third reading because of both the process and the substance of this rather interesting bill. Tēnā koe.

I am really pleased to be able to contribute in the Committee stage of the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. Can I begin by commending the members of the Government Administration Committee, two of whom have already spoken, and I certainly hope that the National members of the select committee are able to contribute later in this debate, as well. We worked really hard on this bill because we all agreed there was a problem. We heard from the Minister for Building and Construction when the bill was referred to us that this was a matter of some urgency. When the Hon Maurice Williamson introduced the bill on 14 March, he actually said that the bill would be reported back to the House by 22 March, just 1 week later. He expected the select committee to call for submissions, to ask for and receive advice, to consider the submissions, to then get the officials’ comments on the submissions, and to deliberate at one meeting. We agreed to try to do that, even though we thought it was pretty impossible to ask for advice and receive it on the same day, and call for submissions and receive them within a week, let alone deliberate carefully on what was clearly a very contentious issue.

We then asked the Minister for another week, which made it 2 weeks in total, and we reported the bill back to the House. We were unable to reach agreement. Holly Walker has very eloquently outlined our deliberation, including the amendment that we made to Part 2. We got it back to the House in good faith, believing that the matter was urgent and that it had to be all done and dusted by 1 April. I resent standing here on 4 July in the real world—2 July in Parliament’s terms—debating a bill that we had given such a high priority to at the select committee because the Minister said it was a matter of critical importance to have it back, done and dusted, in this House before 1 April. So here we are under urgency, 3 months after the self-imposed deadline, debating this matter.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.